What We Seek in Church

I believe…in the church.

So says the Creed. Yet gathering together as a Christian community, has for some time now, been on the wane. There was first the cry of the 1960’s and 70’s that ‘Jesus was just all right” but not the church. Then came the resurgence of conservative Christianity in the 1980’s and 90’s and mega-churches blossomed. Since the turn of the millennium there has been an abandonment of the church. A Barna research poll in 2011 listed six major reasons why Christians 59% of young adults leave church behind.  A 2007 USA Today article posted similar results. A 2012 Public Religion Research Institute survey found that found that “Christians aged 18-24 felt that Christianity was hypocritical (49%), judgmental (54%) and anti-gay (58%).” These are all well known as are the plethora of books that have come out in the past several years on this topic.

Brandan Robertson of the Patheos Revangelical blog conducted a Facebook Survey whose results both mirror those of earlier surveys and polls and goes somewhat deeper in what it is young adults (and presumably young Christian adults) are seeking in church. Not surprisingly, what is sought is a Christianity that is truly lived out and transformative but that still retains deep and intimate connections to the greater history (in bonum partem) of the Christian tradition. That is, young adults, according to Robertson are seeking  life lived and worship experienced as a whole, not as fragments. In other words, they seek a Christianity where worship (Love the Lord your God) and ethics/social justice (Love your neighbor) are not disconnected.

What is being sought is in one very real sense is a Protestantism with a Catholic spine, Anabaptist musculature and Evangelical skin. The ‘skin-only’ Christianity of so much American Protestantism, with its flash and glitz. lights and sound (and fury),  has seen its day.  Its intellectual certitude has been shown to be a castle in the air, its leadership styles too often hegemonic and authoritarian. A worship service is meant to be more than a rock concert, and Christian life is meant to be more than a country club. In short, the success model of Christendom with its ‘theology of glory’ has been shown to be the emperor with no clothes. What is sought is a vibrant Christian faith experienced as a deep connection to the past through liturgical practice enhanced by contemporary music (and not the other way around) and a faith that really treats the neighbor, indeed the enemy other, as Jesus treated others during his lifetime.

I would add one significant note to this: Christianity is changing because it is finally being recognized that the Janus-faced God who torments people in hell forever is not the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth. Kevin Miller has documented this change in his movie Hellbound? It is a more than a seismic shift, it is a theological paradigm shift on a Copernican or Heisenbergian scale. What I call the four pillars of Evangelicalism, viz., eternal conscious torment, penal substitution theory of atonement, inerrancy or infallibility and justification of violence, are each in their own way crumbling before our very eyes. Pull on any one of these threads and the carpet of a Janus-faced theology will begin to unravel exponentially.

This can only be good news, for it means that at long last the grip of a dualistic god whose attributes must somehow be held in tension is finally being toppled. We are only at the beginning of the theological engagement with this theology, but more and more scholars, pastors and regular folks are waking up to the fact that it is possible to say both Jesus, Yes!, and Church Yes!, without having to sacrifice their intellect on the altar of doctrinal irrationality or their emotions to a god who is to be feared above all. It means that as the form of the church is changing so is the content of the gospel it proclaims. The form is coming into being as the good news is being worked out in a new paradigm, a way of doing theology that is not the same old tired way we have been doing it for 500 years. Even so, if Robertson is right, there is tremendous hope for the gathering of the faithful in the days to come. This historical dark night of the soul will also have its dawn. In the meantime we wait with patience, strive with compassion, learn with vigor and live with love toward all humanity, indeed all creation.